Prologue: The Plan
by PlagueRatKat
Summary: Disclaimer: This is an original story. Because I was unable to avoid the category and sub-category, I just picked one randomly. I was hoping to get some feedback on whether or not this is good enough to continue and eventually get publish. If you have any suggestions or ideas, please let me know. Thanks so much!


The Monday started like any other: neither student nor professor was ready for the early morning. Crowds of heavy-eyed students stumbled into classrooms and to their seats while their professors sipped on cups of coffee in the front of the room. Morning lessons always seemed to last longer than any other of the day's lessons.

The morning lessons had just ceased, leaving the instructors to stumble back into the lounge to refill their cups and travel mugs with fresh coffee. The overhead lights remained off as the bright morning sun shone through the picture windows lighting the warm coloured walls of the lounge. A small lamp on an antique desk was illuminating the tan coloured papers of classic novels and maps that lay in the shadow of seasoned English dean, Cynthia Décör.

Cynthia Décör had been employed by Chicago University for nearly eight years. Upon her graduation with her doctorate, she was immediately offered a job from the college she had spent the past 10 years attending. She didn't view her work as a job; she viewed it as a hobby. Reading had always been a great joy in her life and she was now getting paid to read and talk about her favourite books.

This morning, she was slumped over an old tattered copy of Plato's _Critias_. For the past month, she had been plagued by dreams of a paradise: an ancient city forgotten by the hands of time. Those reoccurring dreams have distilled in her a desire to find, at least, the remains of a once great civilisation, but those were nothing more than a fantasy. She couldn't pack up and leave on a wild goose chase for something that might have never existed. Even with all those risks, she continued to dream.

"Cynthia, you have a free period and you're choosing to spend it studying class material?" A smirk played on a dark-skinned face.

"My classes don't start studying Greek literature until second semester."

"Then why trouble yourself now?" The tall male was a fellow employee and friend, Brent Stevens. He is the head of the anthropology department. Every summer, he would take a group of his students to another country, mostly in Africa, so they could experience life in somewhere that wasn't home. He would do this to help his students have a better understanding of what they had learned in the classroom.

Cynthia, on the other hand, could not bring her students to the societies that produced their work of study. Those times were long pass and very few things had stayed the same; everything had changed in one way or another. She had tossed around the idea of bring a group to the places that once reflected the cities in their books, but it had always slipped her mind in class.

"This might sound crazy," she began, looking up to find Brent staring back at her, "but lately, I've been fantasising of finding one of the lost cities. I haven't been able to get my mind off of it."

"You know that it probably never existed, right?"

"I know, but what if it did? What if it's sitting right under our noses, just waiting to be discovered?"

"Why don't you go and find out?" Brent asked as he took a seat on the faux leather couch adjacent to the desk she was working on.

"I can't just abandon my work. My students depend on me." He nodded in understanding as he stretched out on the couch. A silence passed between the two. Before too long, Cynthia turned back to her books and continued her reading. Only the sound of percolating coffee filling the room.

The popping and gurgling of the coffee pot was interrupted by Brent's deep voice. "We could send out a team to explore." This caught Cynthia by surprise. She looked up from her work again.

"We?" She turned to face him. "What do you mean by "we"?" Brent shrugged.

"I'm curious too," came his reply. Her hazel eyes met his blue eyes. They continued to share eye contact for a few short moments.

"Who would we send?" Cynthia asked, breaking the silence.

"Details…" he muttered, waving her off. "Shouldn't we first worry about where to go? Where did they say these paradises were?"

"They never really said. There are some descriptions, but they are so vague, it's hard to pinpoint. Currently, there are many speculations about a true location."

"Where do you think we should look, then?" Cynthia thought. Where was the smartest place to look? Where did Plato see Atlantis? She turned to face the bookshelf in front of her in thought. A long thing blue book demanded her attention. Pulling it off the shelf and on to the desk, she opened it. Sitting in front of her was a large map of the world. The soft sound of the faux leather moving followed Cynthia's actions. She poured all of her attention into the map, scanning, searching for something to pop out; something to tell her, "Look here! Look here!"

"Where do you think we should start?" Brent spoke from right behind Cynthia. She was startled by his sudden appearance over her shoulder.

"Well, Plato said that he could see Atlantis "across the Pillars of Hercules."" She pointed to the Strait of Gibraltar. "It could be anywhere out here." Using her finger, she drew a large circle in the middle of Atlantic Ocean. Both of them searched the papered ocean with an enthusiasm similar to that of a child in a toy shop. Cynthia pursed her lips as she searched over the blue again and again, nothing grabbing at her sight. "The ocean is so vast. How are we going to find a place to start," she muttered, more to herself than to Brent.

They stared at the map for what seemed like forever. Nothing was popping up. Nothing was calling out to them. Cynthia was beginning to feel discouraged when Brent's large hand touched the map, his index finger landing on a small set of islands.

"What about here?" The islands his large finger nearly completely covered were the Azores, a small chain of Portuguese land. They sat on a fault line marked by a long mountain range reaching past Iceland to past the middle of South America. She scanned the space between the Azores and Greece.

"It's so far. There's no way Plato could have seen it from Athens." She didn't bother to look up when addressing him.

"The chances of him seeing Gibraltar from Greece is improbable. This is the only logical place it could be."

"Maybe it's in the Mediterranean."

"Atlantis, or any ancient paradise for that matter, wouldn't have fit in such a place. If I recall right, these places were known for their size. What did Plato say was the size of the island?"

"Um…" she began. She grabbed her battered copy of _Critias _and began to search through it. "He said… "the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together…" If he's talking about the modern-day Libya and Asia, it would no longer be an island."

"They were different back then. The Asia he's speaking of is what we refer to as Asia Minor today. It's likely he knew little about Africa so we can assume that "Libya" meant the southern Mediterranean coastline."

"How big is that?" Brent thought, trying to get a visualisation of the two places. He was quiet for a long while, but Cynthia waited patiently for his answer.

"Somewhere between the sizes of Texas and Alaska, which means, it would never fit in the Mediterranean. The Azores is the ideal place to look." Cynthia let out a small sigh, giving up her fight against him. She knew he was right. The chances of Plato seeing the Strait of Gibraltar were impossible, but seeing through them was more than impossible. The size of Atlantis might have tied in with Plato seeing it from Athens, but, once again, it was improbable. If Atlantis did exist, the best place for it would be in the middle of the ocean. Cynthia pulled out her notebook and wrote down "Azores," the place they would begin their search.

"Who will we send?"

"Well…we'll need someone who can operate a boat," Brent began. Cynthia muttered an "obvious." "And someone who can control a RADAR."

"What about an English major? Someone who knows a fair amount about Plato's work?" She was just throwing an idea out there, not really knowing exactly what, or who, they needed.

"That sounds like a great idea! Do you know of anyone?" She was taken aback by the question. How was she going to come up with a name this soon? She couldn't just give off any name. She had to make sure that the person she was nominating was quite capable to handle a trip like this. One who had excelled exceptionally well with classic literature.

"I'm certain one of my former students would be able take on the challenge."

"Once you've got that squared away, we'll have to find someone who can scuba dive."

"We can't send too many people out there," she stressed.

"We can't send too little out there either. Don't worry, we'll find who we need." Another silence fell over them.

"Who else should be try to find?" Brent was quiet. They had previously discussed what type of people they needed; who else was there?

"Do you remember hearing about that 15 year old girl that graduated from Yale?"

"I believe so. Her name was Katie Day wasn't it?"

"Yeah. Why don't we ask her too? With a genius like that aboard, we might understand what we find."

"If we find anything."

"They say she's a master in several languages, including Latin. She could be a great advantage to our quest."

"How are we going to contact someone like her? A prodigy like her has probably already when swept up in something."

"We won't know until we try. This is your dream. You could be a little more optimistic."

"I'm being realistic. Most people won't want to just pack up their things and go out in search of a place that may have never existed."

"Curiosity is a powerful thing," Brent remarked. Cynthia was silent as she turned and wrote down "Katie Day" in her notebook. "I could call up my old navy buddy and see if he's interested in taking a boat back out to sea." Cynthia stared down at the paper in front of her. Did she just hear right? She turned toward Brent and looked at him with her eyebrows furled in confusion. "He served with me on the USS Ohio."

"You were in the navy?"

"Yeah. That was before I became a professor here."

"I never knew that. Why did you leave?"

"I travelled all over the world, visited many different places, but I never knew anything about the places I was going or the people I was protecting. I enrolled myself at a community college and began learning. Now I'm here," Brent explained. "Has anyone come to mind that has an extensive knowledge of Plato's work and other classics?" The question was sudden. Cynthia had not thought about it at all in the past few moments. This trip was no more than a dream half an hour ago.

She thought back to her classes. None of her first years had been in long enough for her to understand their interests. Certainly, very few were actually interested in literature. Her second year classes were no different. No one stood out. Third years were few and not of the best. The fourth years seemed to care even less about literature than the first years. The longer she thought, the more students she eliminated from the possibility pool. Not one had the interest and knowledge necessary for an exploration like this.

"Stacy Michaels. She graduated last spring. She is the only one who had held any interest in my class."

"Ah, yes, Stacy." Brent looked up at the ceiling and let out a small sigh. "I had her in several of my classes. She is very gifted. I believe she would be an extraordinary choice."

"I'll call her tonight."


End file.
